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Archive for the ‘Self Presentation’ Category
Leading our unethical leaders: Behaving as we want our jurors to behave
Many of us have been members of organizations led by someone we consider unethical. And we’ve seen that people tend to excuse individual behavior when we see it as something done through the charismatic [albeit negative] influence of a group leader.
Now researchers are looking at how we (as members of a group led by an unethical leader) justify our own bad behavior as acceptable since “s/he [e.g., the leader] told us to do it”. The concept is called ‘moral disengagement’ and it describes the process through which we displace our own responsibility for unethical behavior because it was ordered or condoned by someone in leadership. [Think My Lai, Abu Ghraib or Enron, for example.] We think it’s relevant for both the dynamics of juries and our own membership in varied organizations. It’s about our perspective toward what leadership is and how we either stand up for our beliefs or condone unethical behavior.
The researchers looked at various orientations toward leadership and hypothesized accordingly:
High leadership self-efficacy beliefs: These followers see themselves as being as capable as their leaders and may view leaders more as peers. They would likely have a more difficult time displacing responsibility for their own behavior onto an unethical leader.
Low leadership self-efficacy beliefs: These followers see themselves as in need of a leader who is more talented and experienced than they are themselves. They “value harmony and are nonconfrontational in their relationships with others. As followers, the combination of desiring harmony, being unwilling to confront others and having an unsophisticated view of the leader-follower relationship may cause them to be vulnerable toward displacing responsibility onto a leader”.
And they were right. Those who do not see themselves as leadership material, who are nonconfrontational and naive about leadership are more likely to displace responsibility for their actions onto others. The researchers recommend we pay attention to how we educate about leadership–and stop focusing on dividing people up into groups of leaders and non-leaders.
Why? Basically, they warn that ‘followers’ identified as ‘non-leadership material’ may see themselves as less ‘able’ than those designated as leaders. This would increase ‘followers’ being prone to excuse themselves for bad behavior performed on the order or advice of the group leader. Rather, say the researchers, we should focus on educating about the shared responsibilities of the leader and group member/follower.
We would concur. As part of orienting jurors (or new members of an organization) it is wise to educate on how the role of the follower and the role of the leader are much the same. Challenge and empower the typical follower into embracing a stronger role. A perspective where we see our leaders (elected as presiding juror or as leader of our organizations) as sharing responsibility with us is the healthiest and most functional strategy as well as the one most likely to result in all members maintaining responsibility for their own behavior.
When you have a ‘shared orientation’ toward leadership, you do not blindly accept directives, you consider both your values and the views of leaders, and speak up if you disagree. You engage and participate. In other words, you come to resemble (by your nature or your new awareness) those classified as having “high leadership self-efficacy beliefs”.
Justice challenges this rising-up from jurors. We should expect it from ourselves within those groups with which we choose to affiliate.
HINRICHS, K., WANG, L., HINRICHS, A., & ROMERO, E. (2012). Moral Disengagement Through Displacement of Responsibility: The Role of Leadership Beliefs Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 42 (1), 62-80 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2011.00869.x
News You Can Use (like how Pepsi knows there was no mouse in your Mountain Dew)
From time to time we play catch-up with the research and include a number of things we think you would want to know. Most of it is serious. Every once in a while though, a need-to-know tidbit slips out in litigation that we cannot resist incorporating into a post.
We know there was no mouse in your Mountain Dew!
This one has to do with Mountain Dew and a litigant claiming he found a mouse (a dead mouse) in his can of Mountain Dew back in 2009. He was apparently so horrified he did not stop to take a photo or somehow memorialize the evidence. Instead, he put the mouse in a Mason jar and mailed it to Pepsi. Pepsi, according to the litigant, then destroyed the evidence. The litigant requests $50,000 in damages. Pepsi gave this tidbit to the court as they filed a motion to dismiss:
“A scientist who testified on behalf of the company said that there was no way a mouse could have made it through the bottling process intact, that its body would have dissolved into as ‘jelly-like substance’”.
Ewww. Okay. Now that that one is out of the way, here are some things you really should know.
What do whites think of when they see a biracial person?
There’s a video up on YouTube from the recent Association for Psychological Science conference. Sabrica Barnett did some research on what whites assume when they see a biracial other. Her findings are straightforward:
“Whites tend to perceive Black/White biracials as more similar, competent and warm than Blacks. However, they also perceive Black/White biracials as less similar, competent and warm than Whites.”
These are important variables (warm, competent) and we’ve written about them before. One takeaway is that biracial appearance is another “difference” we need to consider in witness preparation and case presentation. Make the witness “like” the jurors through emphasis on ways they are similar, values they share, and questions and testimony that illustrate warmth and character.
We judge you based on your email messages
The popularity of smart phones and tablet computers means we get lots of emails with odd punctuation and spelling and abbreviations galore. This research would indicate we tend to look at those emails and cast judgment. And not only about the age of the writer. It goes way beyond that to predicting emotion, employment relationship and gender.
Researchers showed participants email messages written in either first or third person and with typographical errors versus no errors.
Messages written in third person were seen as angrier and likely written by a supervisor to an employee.
Special attention was paid to the presence or absence of punctuation (specifically exclamation points and question marks) in identification of the writer’s mood state as well as their relationship with the recipient.
Messages with a lot of “expressive punctuation” were more likely to be seen as written by a female.
Contrary to my college kid’s perceptions, grammar and punctuation does matter in email communications. Judgments are made. Take the time to thumb in commas, capital letters, periods and loosen up on the abbreviations. Use those dangerous question marks and exclamation points sparingly. And make sure to proofread with great care, as auto-correction programs are famously erratic (and occasionally hilarious).
McAndrew, FT, & De Jonge, CR (2011). Electronic Person Perception: What do we infer about people from the style of their email messages? Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2 (4), 403-407
Feel the power of that deep and resonant voice!
Remember our Simple Jury Persuasion post on channeling James Earl Jones? Well, here’s another good reason to use a deep and resonant voice! And (of course) it’s backed up by research published in a peer reviewed journal.
As you may recall, earlier research found that women are particularly prone to remember information given to them in a deep voice. So there are reasons to use your own deep voice or to pluck a baritone associate from obscurity to gain practice in the courtroom. But now, we have information that there is benefit to the speaker with that deep voice as well as persuasive power for the listener.
Researchers knew from the literature on embodied cognition that when we speak, we influence not only others but we also feed our own reaction. For example, making sounds of distress, joy, sadness or anger often results in corresponding emotions within. They were also interested in the relationship of hearing a low voice and corresponding assumptions of the speaker being powerful. They wondered what would happen if they had research participants either raise their voice pitch (i.e., speak higher) or lower their voice pitch (i.e., speak in a lower tone than usual).
And the results? When you speak in tone lower than your usual voice pitch, you feel more powerful and you think more abstractly! When research participants listened to someone else speaking in a low voice, it had no influence on their own feelings of power or ability to think abstractly. They had to actually be doing the speaking themselves. In other words, when your voice drops in tone (not just in volume), not only do others pay closer attention, but you measure your words more meaningfully as well.
“The present results imply that when one needs to be powerful (for instance, when being placed in a high-power role or when trying to persuade others), lowering one’s voice is sufficient to feel and think like a powerful person and may help to get the job done.”
While we don’t necessarily recommend you have a special “deep and resonant courtroom-only voice”–there are actors and news anchors who have a special voice they use for certain situations. The point is that when you hear that deeper voice emanating from yourself, you feel more powerful and think more abstractly.
It’s an intriguing idea for courtroom performance–but would likely be a less useful and strategic tool for female attorneys. Women can still tilt heads and strike poses though so a deep voice isn’t everything! It will be interesting to see whether this same result is seen in research about women. Overall though, ditzy or flighty characters in movies and television are usually played by people with higher (even squeaky) voices, while gravitas is typically represented by lower (baritone or alto) voices.
Stel, M., van Dijk, E., Smith, P., van Dijk, W., & Djalal, F. (2011). Lowering the Pitch of Your Voice Makes You Feel More Powerful and Think More Abstractly. Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550611427610
“I like you but I don’t know why”
Ahhh….it’s a good thing we know why. We write regularly about increasing likability of your client by making them “like” your jurors. And for the same reason, we cover research about values, attitudes, beliefs, community and family involvement and so on. This research nugget points out another way of making your client “like” the jurors–and frankly, it’s not one we would have suggested!
Researchers were curious about whether facial resemblance to one’s significant other would influence liking. They recruited heterosexual couples who had been together at least a year. But (naturally) they wanted to test their hypotheses outside of the research participant’s conscious awareness so they took photos of random people and electronically combined them “using morphing techniques” [yes, they really say that] with photographs of the participants’ significant others so that half of the photographs shown to participants resembled their partner and half did not. Then they showed photographs [a combination of the morphed photos and the random shots of strangers] to the participants and had them make “snap judgments” as to characteristics of the person in the photograph.
You guessed it. Participants tended to “like” those photographs morphed to resemble their partners and tended to presume the positive characteristics they saw in their partner belonged to the person resembling their partner. But there were several twists.
Gender makes a difference: Women were more likely than men to judge the ‘morphed’ faces more positively.
Relationship quality makes a difference: People who were happier in their relationships were more likely to make snap positive judgments on the morphed faces than those who were less happy.
The researchers explain these differences by pointing out that past research shows women are more sensitive to subtle facial cues and tend to process visual information more thoroughly than do men.
That may be true. What we wonder about though is whether this might be a “I have to choose between two jurors and I have no idea which one to choose” sort of study. We make snap judgments about people based on their appearance all the time. And so do jurors. But we don’t pause as often to ask ourselves why. Maybe they have a nice smile, or they gratify our vanity by appearing to respond to what we say. But as often as not, we probably fall back onto attributing to that person the qualities we find in someone that looks like them, or dresses like them, or has the same voice.
So. If you have a case with a lot of visual information–you choose your juror based on whether you wish to have them process that information more thoroughly [the female juror] or less thoroughly [the male juror].
Does your anxious client look culpable? Women may pay more attention to that than men since women are more attuned to subtle facial cues. Defense lawyers might want the male jurors while opposing counsel would choose the female.
The reality is that we can never know for certain which juror is going to be ‘best’ for our case when it comes down to two evenly matched ‘not so good for us’ potential jurors– certainly not based on whether they more closely resemble favorite cousin Ruth or ex-wife Sandra. You can choose based on information like this (culled from the research literature) or go based on your intuition/gut. And you can make an amusing anecdote about it during voir dire:
“Ladies and gentlemen, I once had a juror explain to me afterwards that she didn’t trust me for half of the trial because I looked like a bum that dated her sister. I’m glad she kept her mind open, but I don’t want you to struggle with that. Does anyone here see in me or in my co-counsel or clients a familiar face? I promise you we’re nice people, but does anyone see in us the face of someone you don’t like?”
Choose the path you feel best about. The most important issue while presenting a case is not so much having made the ‘right’ decision, as having confidence you made the best decision you could given the information you had available.
Gunaydin, G., Zayas, V., Selcuk, E., & Hazan, C. (2012). I like you but I don’t know why: Objective facial resemblance to significant others influences snap judgments. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, 350-353
“Myside bias”: I was wrong and so are you
We’ve commented on economists writing about psychological principles before on this blog. We tend to enjoy their different perspective. And we especially enjoyed seeing this retraction in the Atlantic by an economist who learned about a form of bias we see often in the courtroom.
Essentially, in the first article, Buturovic and Klein said liberals were less knowledgeable on economic questions than were conservatives. And a firestorm erupted. The authors were accused of either rigging the results or thanked for validating a long-held belief about the inferiority of liberals.
They listened, and they learned. A new study (based on feedback they received from the original work) found a different pattern. For the second study, they added nine additional questions that balanced the study so that the questions either challenged conservative beliefs or challenged liberal beliefs. This time, it didn’t find any difference between the two groups. Their retraction goes as follows:
“One year ago, we reported the results of a 2008 Zogby survey that purported to gauge economic enlightenment. [snip] We also found that that self-identified Progressives and Liberals did much worse than Conservatives and Libertarians, and this finding generated a lot of controversy. Those results were based on eight questions [snip] that specifically challenged leftist positions and/or reassured conservative and/or libertarian positions, while none had a clear slant against conservatives and/or libertarians.
In a new survey, conducted in December 2010, we supplemented those eight questions with another nine new questions, all specifically challenging conservative and/or libertarian positions (and often reassuring leftist positions). [snip] However, the new test consisting of all 17 questions yielded results that vitiated prior evidence of the left being worse. Now, all groups do poorly, with each group tending to do relatively poorly on the questions challenging its positions.”
So, in other words, there is no evidence that liberals or conservatives are smarter when it comes to economics. The differences found were all about the ‘myside bias’–more commonly referred to as the confirmation bias. We want to have our preexisting beliefs validated. We see it pretty consistently with mock jurors.
This week we did a mock trial and divided the jurors into deliberation groups based on age, gender, education and income. On these characteristics, they were as evenly balanced as possible. And then we sat and watched the deliberations to see some jurors responding in favor of the defense and others passionately supporting the plaintiff. As we listened, it seemed to come down to a decision-making style difference. Some emotionally focused on the morality of the issues inherent in the story, while others pounded the evidence and facts and need for personal responsibility.
The point is, that like the economist Daniel Klein, we all have biases. And to revisit that sage, Paul Simon, “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” When challenged, we see see and hear things through the lens of our values and personal experience. Ultimately, we interpret the meaning of what we see and what we hear in accordance with our own biases. It’s a frustrating experience for all involved. Most of us are neither as open nor as gracious in acknowledging our emotional and cognitive errors as is Daniel Klein. For that, he is to be commended. Now if he can just figure out how we can all block that bias in the first place…
Buturovic, Z., & Klein, D.B. (2010). Economic Enlightenment in Relation to College-going, Ideology, and Other Variables: A Zogby Survey of Americans. Econ Journal Watch
Klein, D.B., & Buturovic, Z. (2011). Economic Enlightenment Revisited: New Results Again Find Little Relationship Between Education and Economic Enlightenment but Vitiate Prior Evidence of the Left Being Worse. Econ Journal Watch.
Shepherd S, & Kay AC (2011). On the perpetuation of ignorance: System dependence, system justification, and the motivated avoidance of sociopolitical information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology PMID: 22059846
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